Postdramatic theatre dates from the late 1990s when Hans-Thies Lehmann first published his influential book proclaiming the emergence of the postdramatic in Western theatre. Translated into twenty languages, the book has become an important stimulus within our discipline, and its discourse appears everywhere. One of the most difficult aspects of the concept, however, has been whether postdramatic theatre has or can have a politics, given Lehmann's definitions and pronouncements. A new collection addresses this question as its central focus: Postdramatic Theatre and the Political brings together senior and junior scholars to mull over the possible political entailments of postdramatic theatre. A number of the essays collected here are exceptionally thoughtful; my only real criticism is that none of the authors takes a firmly negative view: that is, no one argues that given Lehmann's definitions of the postdramatic, this theatre form is incompatible with serious politics. I do believe that such an argument can and should be made.
However, the editors have sought out essays which attempt to reconcile the prevalence of the postdramatic with a desire not to abandon politics altogether. The editors constitute an impressive triumvirate: Jürs-Munby is Lehmann's English language translator, Carroll works in aesthetics and history of ideas and Giles is a Brecht specialist. Together they have sculpted a book that highlights Lehmann's original ideas, aesthetics as a possible ground of interpretation, and politics as it differs from the dominant tradition of political theatre, which is, of course, Brechtian. It is no coincidence, then, that the relationship between postdramatic aesthetics and the possibility of political investment is the central question.
Lehmann himself contributes an essay on tragedy in which he argues that theatre engages the political when it stages the inner breakdown of the subject as a political agent and interrupts the aesthetic–contemplative mode. Proclaiming that the historical phase of the autonomy of art is over, Lehmann finds ‘the aesthetic opportunity for intervention in the political lies elsewhere – notably, in variants of an interrupted aesthetic experience’ (p. 107).
Interruption is a key idea in a number of the essays – it is associated with Jacques Rancière, who along with Bertolt Brecht is the most frequently referenced authority in this volume. Lehmann's ideas relate to Rancière's in several ways, especially because for both Rancière and Lehmann, ‘theatre's genuine democratic force is felt not in the harmonious assembly of consent but through practices that make room for disruption or dissent (dissensus), suggesting that the political value of performance is not found in an uncritical “collectivity”’ (p. 22).
Following this line of thought, Brandon Woolf argues that disrupting the logics of the political is the only path toward an ‘aesthetics of resistance’, and Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford suggest that rupturing reality is the path toward a ‘productive insecurity’ that can ‘invite audiences to discover and reflect on unfamiliar aspects of other and their own cultures’ (p. 159). For Jürs-Munby, Elfreide Jelinek's ‘parasitic secondary dramas’ disturb the politics of classical drama by calculated pairings that come at them ‘sideways’ (p. 211), while Michael Wood, focusing on a poetic text of Heiner Müller’s, cites Rancière's dissensus as characteristic of the postdramatic to the extent that it disrupts consensus.
A further use of Rancière appears in Theron Schmidt's essay on Back to Back, the Australian company that features cognitively disabled actors. Building on Rancière's belief that theatre is only political when it stages acts of appearance – the theatricality of its means being also the condition of its politics – Schmidt argues that in Food Court the production ‘stages the idea that disability is precisely a matter of appearance as such … The work is political not because it is opposed to spectacle but because of its construction as spectacle (p. 195, original emphasis)’. These and other essays stress political achievements in postdramatic productions, and take the intentional politicality of the performance-makers for granted.
David Barnett, Shannon Jackson and Peter Boenisch offer the most intelligent and nuanced parsings of postdramatic politics. Barnett, a Brecht expert, carefully sets up a key distinction between post-Brechtian and postdramatic performances, using two productions of Puntila and His Man Matti to achieve this differentiation. For Barnett, Brecht's dialectical method is retained, although put under pressure, in a post-Brechtian theatre that rejects the certainties of fixed ‘knowing categories’ but does not reject the belief that change can and does occur historically over time in a dialectics that is not harmonious, that does not resolve, but multiplies, contradictions while still creating change. Postdramatic theatre, on the other hand, is outside history, creates states that deny a change mechanism, and goes beyond the limits of representation, where referentiality breaks down between the world of the stage and the world of reality.
Shannon Jackson is convinced that the Builder's Association (TBA) does important political work. In her essay about Alladeen she discusses their technological experiments and postdramatic strategies in relation to Brecht and to post-Marxist revisions of ideas about modes of production. Insisting on the political purchase of changing perceptions as a political goal, she quotes Lehmann's well-known opinion that making ‘visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception’ is postdramatic theatre's key political potential. For Jackson, however, the question is precisely ‘how far theatre's “politics of perception” might go’ (p. 169). In Alladeen, TBA is able to change perceptions about the base of global production through theatrical means – it stages everyday performances of call centre workers, played by theatrical workers, thus demystifying a form of immaterial labour that ‘exposes the new “base” supporting global citizenship or, more precisely, the lateralized, mimetic and dynamic set of social interactions that sustain global personhood’ (p. 181).
Peter Boenisch writes about dance, but the really important aspect of his contribution is his clearly stated insight into the stakes of postdramatic subjectivity (or its void) for actual politics: ‘Where any notion of a definable standpoint dissolves into contingency, academic thought loses any political force, becomes rhetorical language itself, while ultimately playing into the hands of the ideology of globalized capitalism with its endless demands for infinitely malleable “flexible personalities”’ (p. 123). However, Boenisch is not retreating into a traditional political analysis because his exemplary model in this essay is Eszter Salamon's Dance for Nothing, in which deconstructed subjectivity becomes the starting point for a three-point relation between history, performer and spectator that depends on a dramaturgy of the fetish. Following Lacan through Žižek, Boenisch suggests that ‘only this knowing lie of clinging to the fetish (e.g. to “perform” subjective acts), and of rejecting the truth (that the subject is an empty, negative void) makes it possible to maintain agency’ (p. 127).
It has proved impossible to discuss all the provocative and stimulating essays in this important book. It will be read and debated for some time to come and makes a strong contribution to untangling the complicated issues of any posited postdramatic politics. It is, however, still quite difficult, at least for me, to understand how Lehmann's insistence that ‘the political has an effect in the theatre if and only if it is in no way translatable or re-translatable into the logic, syntax, and terminology of the political discourse of social reality’ leaves any room for actual engagement with concrete political struggles.
